Mick Murray, Toby Mitchell and Amad “Jay” Malkoun among the biggest Echo taskforce targets
There have been some big crime figures pursued by Victoria Police’s anti-bikie Echo taskforce – with many paying the price for their sins. See the list.
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It’s hard to believe Victoria didn’t have a designated anti-bikie task force until a decade ago.
Those who understood the organised crime landscape knew Victoria was severely lagging and that this was encouraging bikies from Queensland and New South Wales to set up shop down south.
OMCGs had become key players in the state’s colossal drug distribution networks but seemed to be viewed as a low-level menace.
Echo was forced to hit the ground running and immediately started working on the likes of powerful targets like Mick Murray, Toby Mitchell and Amad “Jay” Malkoun, some of whom are facing charges.
Some have wound up doing time for their sins but a handful – like feared triggerman Hasan Topal – decided to beat the posse by heading overseas.
Here are some of those pursued by Echo.
JAY MALKOUN
Malkoun was among the first to be visited by the Echo task force after it was put together was Malkoun.
It was there that the convivial Malkoun let it be known that if police went after his bikie brothers, they would retaliate.
An Echo officer told him: “What will be, will be’’.
Malkoun was the target of a major probe which did not end in his arrest.
The smooth-talking ex-Victorian branch president of the Comanchero left Melbourne for Dubai in 2013 from where he expanded the club.
He presided over a major recruitment campaign in Russia, a country viewed as strategically important in the OMCG world.
Malkoun returned to Australia after a bomb was detonated beneath his car in Greece in 2019.
The now 59-year-old escaped the blast with serious burns.
MICK MURRAY
For almost a decade Murray has called the shots for the Comanchero as either the Victorian or national president.
It is a widely held view within the Echo task force that the gang was at the top of the bikie tree during much of that era.
Murray, who has “Ruthless’’ tattooed under his chin, took control in the period after Amad “Jay” Malkoun left Australia.
In April, Murray was arrested and charged over the 2019 murder of underworld figure Mitat Rasimi.
DOMENIC LUZZA
Luzza rose through Comanchero ranks quickly thanks to his capacity to import large quantities of drugs and his long association with gang heavy-hitter Hasan Topal.
He had contacts in Asia able to manufacture under order huge amounts of analog substances which mimic the effects of traditional illegal narcotics.
They would then be shipped into Melbourne packaged up as legitimate products like eyelash curler, complete with bogus documentation.
Luzza minions would then collect the shipments from secure mailboxes, insulating their boss from the greater risk.
A long covert op uncovered that Luzza imported and trafficked MDMA, ketamine and 100kg of methamphetamine precursor MAPA, capable of yielding 80kg of high-grade ice worth tens of millions of dollars.
Luzza also attempted to import 200kg of 1,4 butanediol – a legal industrial cleaner that turns into GHB when ingested.
This crew was not just mixed up in the trafficking side of things and were responsible for shootings, bashings and firebombings of opponents
Luzza, who lived in a luxury Docklands apartment, was jailed last year in the culmination of an operation dubbed Echo-Maine 2018.
Most members of his loyal crew have also been imprisoned for their various roles.
JOSH FAULKHEAD
“I’m the White Devil,” the ex-Army sniper would tell his victims.
Faulkhead, who typified the modern-day bikie, was all about money before it all unravelled.
Recruited while working in a Queensland gym, he quickly rose through the ranks with the Sydney Comanchero chapter.
Then he returned to the place he grew up, Mildura, where his impact was immediate. Faulkhead was the ringleader of a drug syndicate sourcing and supplying ice into the regional city.
He ruled it with an iron fist.
But within a year of his homecoming, Echo task force was tapping and tracking Faulkhead and his cohort.
By then, there had been public bashings, extortion, blackmail and other dirty deeds.
In a tapped phone call, the enthusiasm of a syndicate member about a future ice shipment into the town made clear the group’s intentions.
``You beauty, we’re gonna wreck this joint,’’ the intercepted dealer said.
Instead, the Echo task force ripped the syndicate apart.
A group of detectives travelled with the highly-trained Special Operations Group and within hours Faulkhead and his underling Anthony Moss were facedown and in cuffs on the street.
Faulkhead was smart enough not to resist. Moss tried to fight back and came off second best.
ROBERT ALE
Echo detectives were not the only people to have had Comanchero associate Robert Ale in their sights.
Ale, now doing an 18-year prison term, was in the Hampton Park Nitro Ink tattoo studio in 2017 when a hit team barged in and shot him nine times, including in the head.
They somehow patched Ale up and he made it to his day in court, where he became one of Echo’s best results.
He had been at head of a criminal enterprise known as the Last Kings, a Comanchero affiliate which was involved in attempted murders, drive-by shootings, drug trafficking and arson.
While he trafficked drugs worth millions, Echo was listening and watching and he was ultimately left with nowhere to run.
Ale, of Lyndhurst, was described by a judge as a predator.
His remorseless attitude was best summed up by a text sent to an associate assigned to shoot up a suburban house.
“Be safe brother, enjoy the adrenaline rush! It doesn’t last long lol,” Ale wrote.
While the Ale prosecution is long dealt with, no charges have been laid over the attack at Nitro Ink.
The smart money says people he once counted as allies were behind it.
TOBY MITCHELL
There is no more recognisable outlaw bikie than Mitchell.
He was shot seven times as a Bandido and quit the club after they failed to “back up” for him.
Mitchell had lost his spleen, kidney and half a liver after he was ambushed by gunmen just weeks after the Echo task force told him his life was in danger.
His rivals attacked him where they knew they could find him, outside Doherty’s Gym in Brunswick, which was next door to the Bandidos’ Weston St clubhouse.
Mitchell, who was the Bandidos national sergeant-at-arms, has never spoken about the hit on him.
Instead, he lived large as a social media personality where he promoted his lavish lifestyle of gold chains, gold watches and gold teeth, via Instagram.
But prison was waiting for Mitchell after he was nabbed carting around the drug ice in car.
Two years later the outlaw emerged from prison only to join another gang – the Mongols.
As its Victorian president he recruited members from Echuca and Melbourne’s north.
In the end it didn’t last. Mitchell was booted from the club in April.
MARK BALSILLIE
Balsillie is regarded as one of the most influential players in Victoria’s OMCG sphere.
When Echo started, he was a rank-and-file member of the Comanchero but that changed quickly after 2017 when Balsillie was shot multiple times in an ambush in inner-Melbourne.
No one was ever charged but Hasan Topal, a one-time mate of Balsillie, is suspected of pulling the trigger on orders from a senior Comanchero.
Balsillie would later saddle up with the emerging Mongols outfit.
Balsillie, regarded as a smart and persuasive individual, was trusted enough by the Mongols to travel to Russia when new members in that country patched over from the Comanchero.
In 2020, Echo charged Balsillie with trafficking a commercial quantity of cocaine, seizing his Lamborghini in the process.
He is one of a recent wave of Mongol departures under the new regime of Phil Main and Nick “The Knife” Forbes.
Balsillie’s next move is expected to be of great interest to Echo.
MATTHEW BRUCE
Dealing with an out-of-control Bruce was an urgent order of business for Echo as he worked his way through the Crimes Act.
The Rebels sergeant-at-arms ran a syndicate responsible for drive-by shootings, trafficking military-style weapons, drug-running, arson and insurance fraud.
Images of Bruce firing a SKS assault rifle in the Wombat State Forest showed the calibre of firepower which was in the wrong hands.
He later tried to sell the gun for $27,000.
Such was his bravado that Bruce drove unlicensed around Melbourne in a car bearing the registration plates “FEARED”.
He recruited family members to play key roles in the syndicate, making an already risky situation particularly sticky when by starting an affair with his de facto’s sister.
The father-of-six from Melton was sentenced to 21 years in jail, with a minimum of 15, in August, 2020.
“You, Matthew Bruce, are a menace to our community,” Judge Bill Stuart said in the County Court.
“Your lawlessness must be condemned.”
PETER ‘SKITZO’ HEWAT
Hewat loves trucks and races them with his son Beau.
That interest has in the past extended to the heavy haulage game where Hewat has built a reputation as an uncompromising operator.
He is in the past been extremely quick to find a broken down semi-trailer on the side of the Hume Hwy and haul it away to a repair shop.
When his was not the first tow truck on the scene, it was said to have barely mattered because Hewat had a habit of convincing other tow truck operators to leave.
His dramas with police have not always been of a traditional OMCG nature.
In 2013, Hewat arrived at the doorstep of a 62-year-old grandmother who had found his runaway dog.
Instead of thanking the woman for finding his wandering pooch and posting signs around the neighbourhood looking for its owner, he got angry.
The woman was unwilling to hand the white shih tzu over to Hewat when he demanded it back.
She had already told his wife she wanted proper identification and blocked the HA from walking into the house.
Hewat responded by punching her in the jaw.
A day later, after she reported the attack to police, two thugs turned up at her house and threatened her.
The Echo task force raided Hewat, finding ecstasy, a stun gun and ammunition.
He would later be jailed in 2016 after another series of raids on Hells Angels, finding $250,000 in stolen car parts.
DENNIS BASIC
Love was in the air when Basic became a “prospect” for the Hells Angels.
The infamous bikie gang didn’t know what they were getting.
Basic had two kids and was dating the daughter of construction mogul.
He was also bouncing back after being arrested and ultimately acquitted over a New South Wales hit plot which had entangled a Swedish beauty.
In the end, the good life wasn’t good enough.
In a quest to start a bikie war, Basic shot up a rival’s clubhouse and business, and when that didn’t work, police suspected he cranked up a machine gun and fired bullets at his own clubhouse in bayside Seaford to fire thing up.
This wild man ended up being too wild for the stringent rules of bikie life.
Basic, in 2014, was jailed over a series of bomb making and firearm offences.
A court heard he was ``in the middle’’ of an ongoing feud with rival gangs which had the potential for ``death and destruction’’.
The ex-Hells Angels prospect never made the grade and he is also no animal lover.
During Melbourne’s lockdown protests in 2021 he was arrested and charged over punching a police horse.
JASON ADDISON
Addison was a bikie boss with a difference.
There was no fancy CBD pad and Instagram updates for the man who ran the Bandidos as national president from the Murray River town of Echuca, regarded as strategically important OMCG turf.
Addison kept a relatively low-profile until the Echo task force charged him in 2014 over fraud and extortion.
It was alleged the stonemason had sold his business to another Bandido for more than $200,000 before kicking him out of the club and taking his business back for nix.
Years later, Addison patched over his Echuca clubmates to the Mongols as that outfit expanded its reach into country Victoria.
Instigated by his former Bandido mate Toby Mitchell, it was to be a short-lived association.
Addison, along with Mitchell, was among those who have recently quit or were expelled from the Mongols in a purge by club leaders.
LEE UNDY
The hulking Bandido could smack a golf ball out of sight at Growling Frog in Yan Yean.
But Undy couldn’t tee off at the Echo task force he would have arrested him.
Echo did warn the big man about a threat to his life at Melbourne Airport and it got him thinking.
A couple of years later, Undy tired of the Bandidos and moved to Queensland where he settled in Port Douglas setting up a gym and yoghurt shop.
But bad habits die hard.
Police found him with a kilo of cocaine, pleading guilty to his offending in 2021.
Behind bars until 2023, Undy has made it known he has reflected on his life and found God.
JOSH EDDY
Eddy ran a vehicle-cleaning business called Cartel in the Murray River town of Cobram.
But Echo accuses Eddy of running another kind of cartel which distributed big amounts of methamphetamine in the area.
They alleged he was the local Mongols sergeant-at-arms, a position which involves the enforcement of order and gang rules.
Eddy was arrested and charged in July last year after a protracted Echo investigation into his activities and those of his family and associates.
They say an operation involving raids in the area uncovered 2.5kg of cocaine and 1kg of methamphetamine.
Also charged were his father David and teenage sister Jaide.
David Eddy was arrested as he crossed the Barooga-Cobram bridge on his way back into Victoria, allegedly with $100,000 and a loaded gun in the back.
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